Lords of Grass and Thunder (65 page)

Chimbai-Khan had risen from his tears and by some magic of the underworld held the reins of two horses with eyes of fire, one black and one roan. “He can’t have gotten far,” he agreed with the Lady Temulun, his khaness. “But finding him will prove the simpler part of the task.”

They would have to fight the hungry spirits, Eluneke thought; already the faceless wraiths of forgotten ancestors were tugging at her clothes and tangling clawed fingers in her hair. Not wanting to hear the answer if it proved dire, she nevertheless had to ask, “Is Mergen here with you?”

Chimbai shook his head, but a new sorrow marked his bold face. “I chose wrongly in the ordering of my brother,” he admitted, and sighed, a sound more terrible when uttered by a spirit. “Only regrets bound him to the mortal realm, and those are quickly severed when the proper rites are performed. He has followed the path to the ancestors. In his next life, I hope he enjoys a greater peace of spirit than I ever left to him in this.”

Eluneke nodded, glad that her father had escaped the traps that might have bound him in torment as a hungry spirit. She worried a little on that score for the khan and his khaness, but they had neither the red and hungry eyes of the lost nor the rapacious apetite of those who would devour the living. She had to find Tayy before that could happen to him.

Reading her mind again, it seemed, Chimbai mounted his fire-eyed black steed. His lady took her place in the saddle of the roan and Eluneke climbed onto the back of her own mount, smoky pale as bone. With a cry, they were off, riding across a landscape of darkness with the silver grass over their heads bending in their passing, as if from the impact of galloping hooves.

The noise was overpowering. Battle cries clashed with the screams of the wounded and the frenzied calls of the horses caught in their own battle madness. Bekter hated it, just as he hated the smell of blood and fear that sharpened the sweat of man and beast. Once he’d led Jochi’s army past the demon’s spell, however, he’d had no choice but to wrap a silver band around his arm and join the general’s horde in battle.

He raised his sword over his head and brought it down in a slashing blow that took the arm off a man he vaguely recognized as an archery trainer in Chimbai-Khan’s army. In the midst of the chaos of battle, they’d stopped and stared at each other for a moment. Then the archer raised his bow and Bekter knew the silver band around his arm for a trick. Jochi had ordered his army to wear just such a band to identify them as the khan’s own.

Qutula had dressed his army with a band of green the color of the tattoo he wore on his breast: the emerald green bamboo snake that had caused the Qubal so much pain. By wearing silver, however, the archer had penetrated deep into Jochi’s horde before Bekter stopped him. He wouldn’t have had a chance against his older, more battle-hardened teacher, except that the soldier hesitated to attack the brother of his own general.

Bekter had no such qualms, though he tried his best to deliver a wounding rather than a fatal blow. With an involuntary grunt of shock, the old soldier went very pale and fell in a swoon from his horse. There was no way to save him. The battle swirled around them, horses crossing the ground where the wounded archer had fallen. When the armies rode on, his old teacher lay beaten into the soft ground, his bones shattered by the many hooves that had passed over him.

The sight of such terrible death turned his stomach, but Bekter refused to turn away.
I did this,
he thought.
A man I once knew is dead because of me.
This wasn’t his first battle, only his first against warriors he had grown up with, who had sworn their loyalty to his brother. In despair he would have ridden from the battlefield. How could he preserve his honor when all choices led to betrayal? Did he fight Qutula or commit treason against his khan?

Neither Chimbai nor Mergen had chosen Qutula to succeed them, however. It pained him to set his arm against his brother, but he couldn’t let Qutula tear apart the ulus to seize for himself a position to which he had been neither anointed nor elected. He couldn’t support his brother, but he hoped they might end this war with as little damage on each side as possible. And, he decided, he’d already done his share.

So Bekter forged ahead through the chaos of battle. Swinging his sword wildly to either side, he strove to keep his new enemies at arm’s length while striking none of them. His opponents knew him and gave way as he came on, but they harried him like herders, cutting him out of the herd and giving him their own direction to run.

Advancing without resistance, Bekter left his own army behind before he realized what had happened. Suddenly, he found himself surrounded by Qutula’s green armbands. Qutula himself came forward, a spear held lightly in his hand. The Lady Chaiujin, openly flaunting her influence over him, rode at his side.

“My brother.” Qutula’s smile, more serpentlike than his lady’s, sent a chill down Bekter’s spine. “I wondered when you would come to me.”

“I didn’t.” There seemed no point in glancing behind him. Qutula’s followers had moved them far out of the path of the fighting. Jochi’s troops couldn’t help him now; he had nothing to do but to brazen out this confrontation. Perhaps Qutula would let him go back to his own side. Probably not, but as a prisoner, he’d be in a better position to help the prince if needed. Or so Bekter hoped. The light in Qutula’s eye didn’t encourage defiance of his will, however. He signaled for his followers to move away, out of hearing, though not out of range of their bows. The lady stayed at his side, summing up Bekter with a steady gaze that said he’d make a tasty supper.

“I seem to have strayed from my position,” Bekter admitted with a self-deprecating bow over his pommel. “If you will just point me in the direction of the battle . . .”

“I’m doing this for both of us,” Qutula argued, clearly impatient to be done with his brother. “We were the khan’s own sons; we deserve the spoils of his death.”

“He gave us what he wished us to have. His death didn’t change that.”

“We would have had more, if Sechule hadn’t murdered him. We can still have more. You’ll rule over the South in Yesugei’s place, and put your hand under no foot but mine when I am gur-khan over the Qubal, as our father would have wished.”

Sechule had murdered their father? The shock rocked him in his saddle. He’d heard rumors about Qutula, but he’d dismissed even those. The court had lately buzzed with gossip about Sechule’s return to Mergen’s bed. He thought they’d come to some agreement. Now he didn’t know what to think.

“An accident, the wrong herb . . .” He denied the accusation, refused to believe she could do something like that out of malice. She was his mother.

“Don’t be a fool. He made her angry, and so she killed him. So we fight for what should have been ours by right of birth.” Qutula was hiding something from him, but still, if even part of what he said was true, it convinced him more than ever that Qutula was wrong.

“I won’t fight with you.” Dropping his sword, he moved his hands away from his sides to show he didn’t mean to fight. “I am your prisoner,”

“Pick. It. Up.” Qutula raised his spear.

They might have been strangers for all the recognition in Qutula’s stern countenance. He meant them to fight, and Bekter knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he couldn’t kill his brother. Not that his resistance to fratricide mattered to the outcome. Against Qutula in a killing rage he would have no chance. And Qutula was very, very angry.

“You’re my brother,” Bekter reminded him.

“No longer.” Qutula’s mare shied, and he brought her savagely under control, never taking his narrowed eyes from his brother. “You’ll fight, or you’ll die a coward.”

Bekter let his breath out in a sigh he tried to muffle between his teeth. Qutula meant what he said, but still he had to try. “If you can murder your own brother, an unarmed prisoner taken in honorable combat, then you will just have to do it. Because I won’t fight you.”

“Pick. It. Up.”

A call to honor wasn’t working. Qutula was going to kill him, and Bekter decided that he couldn’t watch him do it. Better to turn away with the memory of happier times marshaled about him to comfort his last moments.

“I’m sorry,” he said, thinking of all the things he regretted, not least that he hadn’t paid more attention to his brother’s complaints before they came to murder. Not even Bolghai could turn back time, however. So he bowed to the false Lady Chaiujin and to his brother. Then, trembling with fear, he turned his horse and started back the way he’d come.

“Then join our mother among the ancestors.”

“Sechule—” Gods and spirits, his own mother. Qutula was mad. He had to be stopped.

The spear, when it struck, felt like like a punch between his shoulder blades. Bekter didn’t realize, at first, that he was injured. When he tried to breathe, however, his ribs refused to rise. He could draw not even a sip of air.

“Oh!” he said, surprised by the sudden pain that convulsed his hands on his reins.

Mother.
His thoughts seemed to separate themselves from his body, which grew heavier as his head grew lighter, until he slipped from his horse. He landed with his face in the mud. The wound in his back suddenly caught fire, or so it felt. No images of his brother came to him now. If Sechule were dead as Qutula claimed, perhaps she would come for him. But in his mind’s eye Bekter saw the soldier he had wounded, trampled and broken and dead in the splinters of his own bones. They hadn’t lied about paybacks being a bitch.

“Leave him to the crows,” he heard Qutula say from the vast distance of his saddle.

Bekter heard the horses moving away, but no hoof touched him. Soon enough the battle would come this way, and then it wouldn’t matter. Though he waited, Sechule did not appear to guide him to his ancestors. Bekter closed his eyes and let the darkness hold back the pain for a little while longer.

“There’sfighting to the north, two armies engaged but no tents that I could see.”

The scout bowed low and Daritai accepted his report with a nod before turning to the next. He had pitched his tents the other side of a low rise in the grasslands so that the innocent camp followers going about their daily work in the Qubal tent city would not see a foreign horde threatening. They were in easy range of any spies that Mergen might choose to send. He’d already had news that some argument had split the Qubal, however, and his army was mounted and ready to ride at his command.

“And the gur-khan?” he asked the man who had been sent to spy out Mergen-Gur-Khan’s tent city. Around him his captains listened with sharp-eyed attention, adding up the odds for their success in the quarrels of their neighbors.

“Mergen Gur-Khan is dead,” the scout reported. “His blanket-son wages war against the prince, Mergen’s heir, leaving the tent city abandoned except for women and children and those too old to fight. General Jochi has left a mere handful of the Qubal horde to guard their tents.”

“There are rumors,” the first scout added to his report, “that the heir is also dead and General Jochi fights only to hold onto the ulus until Yesugei-Khan comes.”

The news didn’t surprise him. Daritai had seen the discontent simmering in the eyes of the young Captain Qutula. A Durluken youth had murdered General Jochi’s son, more reason for him to go to war against those who now moved openly to seize the ulus. But Yesugei-Khan had his own affairs to consider and was, anyway, far to the south.

“We’ll leave the general to fight over the broken remains of Mergen’s horde,” Daritai decided, “and take this city while his back is turned. Whoever survives to claim it will be weakened from battle when he faces our army, many times the size of his own which will be divided and suffering the absence of their injured and their dead.”

“We ride?” his captain asked

“When Great Sun touches the mountains,” Daritai agreed. They would fall on the Qubal like a great darkness out of the sunset. The shadows cast before them, stretched and weird as they passed over tents and across the avenues, would strike terror into the hearts of the city before ever a sword was drawn. With luck, he could take her with terror alone and no blood spilt on either side.

His captains bowed and began to file out of the command tent, to carry his orders to their lieutenants. They understood his purpose and would make his wishes clear: no plunder, no rape, no savagery. The Qubal would surrender to him out of fear. If he hoped to make any stand at all against his father, however, they must come to see him as their deliverer, freeing them from the chaos their leaders had brought on them.

He was alone with his adjutants and his messengers when the last of his scouts arrived, sweating and breathless from a hard ride. “Speak, and do it quickly,” he told the man, who put his hands to his thighs to brace his low bow. “We ride in an hour.”

“A messenger reached General Yesugei-Khan before I could intercept him.” The man dropped to his knees before his prince, knocking his head upon the carpets in abject apology for his failure. “General Yesugei has now left his own camp behind and flies to the aid of the Qubal.”